"The capitalists take all the risk, so they should get most of the pay"

What's the leftist response to this? It doesn't really sit right with me, but I didn't have much of a response.

Read Marx

N-NO RISK NO REWARD!

Well, how did they get the money to take the risk?
Three options here.
1. Exploited the proletariat at a smaller scale. Doesn't deserve due to the proletariat deserving all their labor creates.
2. Inherence, which means they get free money they didn't work for. Doesn't deserve it.
3. Pulled himself up by his bootstrap, well, good job? It's honestly really hard to do so, so more likely option 1 or 2.

A bullet.

Yes.

"but you can just get another job"

yeah if you want to shoot every person on earth with shitty class consciousness then by the time you're done depopulation is going to be a way bigger problem than capitalism ever was.

It's ultimately a problem of the wage system itself. The fact that risk itself is worth a wage strikes me as fascinating; it's not labor yet dodging it is rewarded.

"read steve keen"
i mean it's a long winded way of getting there, but fundamentally it reiterates a very important point raised by keynes: the distinction between risk (calculable) and uncertainty (butterfly effect tier mess.), with most economic activity realistically falling into the uncertainty category.

you cannot price uncertainty. "what will the value of this factory be in 20 years?" isn't a question any of us can realistically answer. brazen conflation of uncertainty with risk is one of the reasons we wound up with CDOs.

All of these things can be accepted within a broadly capitalist framework. When you realize the capitalist investor also has basically no idea what he's doing (or is outright gambling - i.e. "i don't know what this factory will be worth in 20 years, but i can sell these shares to a sucker who thinks he can sell these shares to a sucker who'll sell them to a sucker who'll be stuck with them during a market-downturn anyway, so who gives a damn about the factory?") with regards to productive investment, his take starts to seem far less justifiable.


economy has a labour surplus, stupid response.
"but you can just start another business"

This is the correct response. Why should a man who is not doing any of the labour which produces the value take part of this value for himself?

Even in exceptional cases like these, I do not see how one can justify profiting off labour just because you once did some yourself. The ideological edifice built on being created equal crashes down when not everyone can become a capitalist.

It's worth noting that even working for someone is a risk when getting fired once has the potential to screw you for an extended period of time.

And every job tends toward shittiness as time progresses because capital develops & deskills rebellious labor, as they are disposable once they're done translating their potential work into commodities to be sold.
This system progresses with the above as 1 step further infinitely until you get to the same results as AI automation: complete disposal of the worker in the name of value-producing logic.
It's naked domination forced by outside circumstance once you strip away the phony "free market" cover. Markets are only "free" if you remove every last bit of context and make man a homo economicus whose existence has been repeatedly disproven by anthropology (which is to say, markets work on paper but not in real life).
We communists, Marxian and anarchist, do not want self managed firms or "free stuff" - we want the complete abolition of firm and value, to abolish work by returning the labor needed to maintain society back into daily life, as it was for most of human history.

A normal person can understand these words, right?

In the US capitalist corporations have person-hood which deflects all risks to this puppet. They can go out of business and be sued without a loss out of their own pocket but the people who work for them are who actually lose their livelihood.

"Google Murray Bookchin!"

Oh I completely agree, he doesn't deserve the product of the proletariat's labor.

So can the capitalist.

This is when the state literally reduces the capitalist's liability when things go wrong.

For example, if a lawsuit is brought against the company, the owner is not himself responsible for paying the money but rather the corporation.

However, although the risk is spread out through the corporation, the profits aren't. Any fines or financial issues are dealt on the whole corporation first, but then the capitalist can just fire workers or reduce their pay, while maintaining his salary.

It's true that the capitalist takes some risk, but the workers always bear equal or greater risk. And that's without getting into subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks.

Oh, it looks like someone did mention LL here:

Nassim Taleb loves talking about risk and anti fragility all the time and "skin in the game".

If 2008 should teach us anything, it is that large institutions can just leverage their failures unto the public because they have made themselves indispensable to the economy. This is why they shouldn't be able to profit off the bureaucratic fubction they provide.

Moralize.

Much more effective is the communist response.

Actually it's their creditors that take all the risk, so really the banks should just own everything

What risk?

Members of the investor class generally have far more money than they need to meet their material needs. Unless they make truly disastrous mistakes, they will always have access to a nice place to live, medical care, education for their kids, etc.

Once someone is rich enough to own a means of production, it's extremely rare for them to fall down to the proletarian level; they almost have to try to do so. When they decide to invest in something, the only thing they're risking is some zeroes in their bank account.

And as someone else mentioned the biggest capitalists bribe politicians to have the government underwrite their investments, so there's truly no risk at all for them.

Workers, on the other hand, take huge risks. Take out a loan for a car so you can get to your new job and hope you don't get laid off with no way to pay the note. Try to choose a college degree that will still be in demand when you graduate and give you a way to pay off your student debt. Go without health insurance for a year and hope you don't get sick. The proletariat are forced to make a series of gambles where the wrong choice can mean an early death or a lifetime on the edge of homelessness.

...

If capitalists are taking so much risk why don't we see most of them ending up homeless? Do people forget what the word "risk" means?

The actual answer is that most businesses fail because they're small businesses. Petit bourgeois do actually take most of the risks, but they are distinct from bourgeoisie proper. They are usually massive shitters when they succeed (due in part to the stress and trauma they went through to get there and in part to the nature of power), but the whole point of their existence is to take literally all the work out of being a member of the bourgeois class. Let the proles try their hand at capitalism and on the rare occasion it works, buy them out, relegate them or replace them with a prole manager, and sit on the profits yourself.

Much like the fact that CEOs are technically just employees hired by the board of directors, isn't most of a capitalist's "work" just giving money to a bank, and letting hired investment brokers make decisions about where to invest it?

Due to fractional reserve banking, the average prole's meager savings and porky's ill gotten gains are both part of the same indistinguishable pool of investment liquidity.

Rousseau had a response to Locke along the lines of questioning why somebody should appropriate property from nature and the common stock of humanity just because they mixed their labour with it. Since that person mixing their labour with it of their own accord for their own benefit does not entitle them to impose property relations on the rest of the world. I think a similar scenario applies to risk. Nobody asked you to do this, you did it on your own to benefit yourself, why should other people give up what they have built with their own labour to somebody else just because they took a risk? I can take all kinds of risks. If I go wrestle a bear I'm taking a risk but it would be ridiculous for me to demand that the government pay me to do it.

Many workers risk their lives in their job, I'm pretty sure dying is worst than losing your company.

You forgot to mention that there is the option of a loan from a bank (which is probably the most common for start ups)

Ask them about bailouts, government funding and regulations, cost of environmental pollution, and so on and so on.

What risk?

There shouldn't be a risk to be taken in the first place. We should eliminate material scarcity to a point where people aren't subject to awful living conditions just because they can't find work or in the case of these capitalists risk their monetary well being just to hopefully be successful.

Private property is a funny thing. It's an ethereal link between a man and his possessions, and the only proof of its existence is a handful of papers buried somewhere, like a spell. Were the papers to vanish, and the property could could no longer be enforced. It's the closest thing this world has to magic.

As said, read Steve Keen or Anwar Shaikh.
If capitalists were risk takers they'd be putting money in startups on kickstarter rather than buying up property, and it wouldn't be governments that are funding things like electric vehicles and solar panels.

You clearly don't understand the word "risk". You are too dumb,, even for a leftist.

No one mentioned yet that our dear president is still a billionaire despite having declared bankruptcy 6 times?

Come to think of it, Trump incarnates late stage capitalism awfully well.

if they're taking a risk with a loan from the bank, theyre taking risks with someone else's money.

also accumulation of capital allows for bigger risks, which causes amplifying crises as people keep profiting off each crash to take bigger risks

since when are capitalists preoccupied with ethics?

They take no risk after initial investment is payed off.

With the wealth a business typically generates they merely have to pay off the costs of investments, which includes the workers wages, and everything beyond that can be considered profit. The moment a business is no longer able to support the costs of investments they can merely sell off said business and use the capital gained from the sale to start a new business or retire depending on how much they have earned in total.

If they cannot sell it they can merely shut down and go on their own way.

Meanwhile, the worker is now without any means of earning capital all because they took the risk of working for someone.

What risk? Your laon is given to a limited liability entity so if you fuck up you dont even have to pay it back.